Boer War: How Gold and Diamonds Started a War That Shocked the World
The Boer War ran from 1899 to 1902, and Britain won. But the victory came with burned farms, concentration camps, and tens of thousands of civilian deaths — most of them children. The Boers were Dutch-speaking settlers in southern Africa who had built their own republics and refused to give them up. They held out far longer than anyone in London expected. When it was over, the British Empire had spent £200 million and destroyed over 30,000 homes. This is the full story of what happened, and why it still matters.
By WorldHistoryArchive·June 10, 2026·History·10 min read · 1,847 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/second-boer-war-1899-1902-south-africa-causes-concentration-camps
The Boer War ran from 1899 to 1902, and Britain won. But the victory came with burned farms, concentration camps, and tens of thousands of civilian deaths — most of them children. The Boers were Dutch-speaking settlers in southern Africa who had built their own republics and refused to give them up. They held out far longer than anyone in London expected. When it was over, the British Empire had spent £200 million and destroyed over 30,000 homes. This is the full story of what happened, and why it still matters.
The Boer War lasted three years, from 1899 to 1902, and it was unlike any colonial conflict Britain had fought before. Britain won. But the victory was deeply uncomfortable, and it came with a price — in money, in lives, and in the way the British public saw their own empire.
The war was fought in southern Africa between the British Empire and two small Boer republics. The Boers were White settlers with Dutch ancestry who had built their own independent states. They were heavily outnumbered and had far fewer resources, but they proved to be much harder to beat than anyone in London expected.
By the time it was over, over 28,000 Boer civilians — roughly 80 percent of them children — had died in British-run concentration camps. More than 30,000 farms had been burned to the ground. And over 100,000 Black Africans who had helped the British during the war were left out of the peace deal completely.
This is a war that history classes often rush past. It deserves a closer look.
Britain entered the Boer War expecting a quick, manageable colonial conflict. What they found was a three-year war against a mobile and determined enemy on difficult terrain — a conflict that forced serious changes in British military tactics and damaged the empire's international reputation.
How Two Groups With Different Languages Ended Up at War
The Boers had been in southern Africa since the 17th century. Settlers from the Netherlands, Germany, and France arrived and built farming communities there. The word Boer simply means farmer in Dutch. Over generations, these communities developed their own language — Afrikaans — and their own strong sense of identity. They called themselves Afrikaners.
In the 1830s, a large group of Boers decided to move away from British-controlled territory in the south. This migration was called the Great Trek. The Boers eventually founded two independent republics: Transvaal in 1852 and the Orange Free State in 1854. They wanted to be left alone to govern themselves. The British, who were steadily expanding their territory across southern Africa, had other ideas.
The tension turned serious when natural resources entered the picture. Diamonds were discovered in Griqualand in 1867. The British quickly took over the area and its mines. Then, in 1886, gold was found in the Witwatersrand region of Transvaal. Suddenly the Boer republics were sitting on top of two of the most valuable mineral deposits in the world.
British mine owners and investors poured money into those gold mines. They resented that the Boers controlled the land and set the rules. The Boers resented British interference. Both sides tried to outmanoeuvre the other through politics and diplomacy. Eventually, that stopped being enough.
On October 9, 1899, the Boer president of Transvaal, Paul Kruger, issued a 48-hour ultimatum demanding that British troops withdraw from the border. The British refused. War was declared two days later, on October 11.
The discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in 1886 turned Transvaal into one of the most valuable pieces of land in the world — and made a war between Britain and the Boer republics almost inevitable.
The Boers Win the First Rounds
When the war started, the Boers knew they had to act fast. British reinforcements were on the way from London, and once they arrived, the numbers gap would become too large to overcome.
Boer fighters were not a professional military. But they had two major advantages. First, they were well-equipped with the latest rifles, machine guns, and artillery pieces. Second — and more importantly — they knew the terrain. The veld, the wide flat scrubland of southern Africa, was home ground for them.
Boer fighters were organized into mobile units called commandos. They could move quickly, strike hard, and disappear back into the landscape before the British could respond. They were also excellent marksmen with long-range smokeless rifles. Smokeless meant you could not see where the shots were coming from. British officers quickly stopped carrying ceremonial swords and removed the badges showing their rank — because Boer snipers were targeting officers first.
In mid-December 1899, the Boers won three major battles in a single week. The British called it Black Week. The battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso all went to the Boers. The following month, January 1900, the Boers won again at the Battle of Spion Kop.
British commanders had badly underestimated the enemy. They gave confusing orders, used poor maps, and set goals that were not realistic — like trying to storm well-fortified hills with frontal attacks. The British public and government were shaken.
The Siege of Mafeking and What It Proved
While fighting battles across the region, the Boers also surrounded several British garrisons to pin them down. They laid siege to Ladysmith, Kimberley, and a town called Mafeking. The idea was to trap the British troops inside and take them out of the wider war.
The plan had a flaw. Keeping the sieges going required a large number of Boer fighters too — fighters who could not be used anywhere else.
The siege of Mafeking became the most famous. British forces and allied Tswana warriors held the town for 217 days. Their commander, Robert Baden-Powell, became a hero in Britain for his determined and creative defence. A British relief column finally broke through and reached the town in May 1900.
The siege showed something the British had not fully expected. This was not a typical colonial war against a poorly-armed enemy. The Boers had modern weapons and used them well. The war was starting to look more like a conflict between two European-style forces than a quick campaign to bring a resistant group into line. It also made clear that civilians on both sides were going to pay a heavy price — not just soldiers.
Boer commandos were not a professional army, but their familiarity with the terrain, their skill with long-range rifles, and their ability to move quickly made them far more effective than British commanders had anticipated going into the war.
Britain Sends a Quarter Million Soldiers
After Black Week, the British government stopped treating this as a small colonial campaign. They sent colonial troops from Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, adding 30,000 men from across the empire. The total British force grew from 25,000 soldiers to over 250,000.
The Boers could field a maximum of around 60,000 fighters. That gap in numbers, combined with British control of the railway lines, eventually swung the war around.
In March 1900, the British defeated a major Boer force at Paardeberg. The key Boer town of Bloemfontein was taken shortly after. On May 24, the Orange Free State was formally annexed and renamed the Orange River Colony. Johannesburg fell a week later. In June, Pretoria — the capital of Transvaal — was captured. By October, Transvaal itself was annexed.
But the war was not over. The Boer leaders refused to surrender. Instead, they changed their strategy completely.
Burning Farms and Building Camps
Rather than surrender, the Boers switched to guerrilla warfare. Small groups of fighters hit British units quickly, then vanished back into the countryside. They raided supply lines and attacked into Cape Colony. The British could not pin them down for a decisive final battle.
The British commander-in-chief, Herbert Kitchener, responded with a strategy that was effective but deeply troubling in what it required.
First came scorched earth. British forces burned crops, confiscated livestock, and set fire to over 30,000 Boer farms and homes. The goal was simple: cut off the guerrillas from the supplies the local population could provide. With nowhere to go and no food supply left, the fighters would have to give up.
Second, Kitchener divided the land. He used hundreds of kilometres of barbed wire fences and concrete blockhouses to break the territory into sections, limiting how far Boer fighters could move without running into a British checkpoint.
Third — and most controversial — thousands of civilians were placed in concentration camps. The word concentration here simply meant gathering people in one concentrated location. These were not death camps by design. But they became deadly by neglect. Food supplies were inadequate. Medical care barely existed. Disease, especially measles and typhoid, spread fast through the crowded camps.
The death toll was catastrophic. Up to 28,000 Boer people died in the camps — and roughly 80 percent of those deaths were children under 16. Around 20,000 Black Africans held in separate camps also died. For comparison, about 7,000 Boer fighters were killed in actual combat during the entire war. The camps killed far more people than the fighting did.
The news reached Britain through the press, and the public reaction was fierce. Questions were raised in parliament. Following the outcry, control of the camps was taken from the army and handed to civilian authorities, who worked to improve the conditions. Kitchener ended the scorched-earth policy in December 1901 and ordered that no more Boer women and children be arrested. By that point, around 117,000 Boer women and children and 119,000 Black Africans had been detained across 46 camps.
The concentration camps of the Boer War were not built to kill people — but the inadequate food, overcrowding, and lack of medical care caused up to 28,000 Boer deaths, around 80 percent of them children, and approximately 20,000 deaths among Black African detainees.
How the War Ended and What It Cost
The last major battle of the war was won by the British at Roodewal on April 11, 1902. On May 31, 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed, formally ending the conflict. Boer prisoners of war were released in the months that followed.
The numbers are sobering. The war cost Britain £200 million — equal to roughly £21,000 million in today's money. More than 30,000 homes had been destroyed. Millions of livestock were dead. At least 330,000 horses were killed during the campaign.
The war changed something in how some British people saw their empire. An economist and social scientist named J. A. Hobson became one of the loudest voices asking what the whole conflict had really been about. His argument was direct: wealthy private interests — the mine owners and investors who stood to profit from controlling southern Africa's gold and diamonds — had pushed for a war that ordinary British taxpayers and soldiers paid for with money and lives. The public got nothing from it. The investors got the mines.
This was a new and uncomfortable idea for many British people, who had generally seen the empire as a source of national pride rather than something that served powerful business interests at the public's expense. The Boer War planted a seed of doubt that did not go away.
The People the Peace Deal Forgot
One of the least-told parts of the Boer War is what happened to Black South Africans — both during the conflict and after it was over.
More than 100,000 Black Africans contributed to the British war effort. They worked as soldiers, scouts, messengers, grooms, porters, servants, and labourers. Many of them hoped that helping Britain win would lead to real improvements in their own lives and greater political rights.
They were wrong.
Black African leaders were not invited to the peace talks. Their rights were deliberately left unresolved — set aside until White self-government was established first. After the war, the situation for Black South Africans did not improve. It got worse. They were steadily pushed out of political participation and subjected to increasingly strict discriminatory laws.
In 1910, just eight years after the war ended, Transvaal, the Orange Free State, Cape Colony, Natal, and several former African kingdoms were merged into one political unit called the Union of South Africa. The government of this new country was dominated by Afrikaners. The structures built during this period — the exclusion of Black Africans from political power and equal rights — would eventually become the official system of apartheid, which formally began in 1948.
The Boer War is often remembered as a British military story, or as the story of the Boer fighters who held out so long against impossible odds. Both of those stories are real. But the story of what happened to the people whose land both groups were fighting over — and who helped decide the outcome — deserves equal space in the history of this conflict.